Moving forward...

A bittersweet day for me. A quiet solace pervades my heart at the knowledge that a human butcher has been captured in a most unglorified state for all the world to see, with vermin in his beard and helpnessness in his aura.

(Aside - A CNN reporter just said that upon being asked about the mass graves, Saddam replied that "those people were thieves." Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, nor the apologetic justifications of a Marxist university professor.)

If humanity is ever to one day move beyond tyrants, we have to start questioning some very entrenched givens - 'common sense' notions accepted by a large part of the world. Why is it that I know no one bearing remotely close to the level of Saddam's viciousness in my circle of friends, co-workers, relatives, or other people I have known? Why is it that these barbarians are almost solely found as the head of states or their friends? I don't have all the answers, but I do know that these savages never did evolve past the caveman ethos of fixed-sum interactions; it was either rule or be ruled, torture or be tortured, kill or be killed. Systematized violence can only be a filtering mechanism for these aggressive brutes to rise to the top. Who really are the utopians?

One less tyrant freely walks the Earth today.

Rarely in life are there any chaste victories - libertarians often expect too much purity in the slow march toward a free world - and depending on your views, this might not be one of them. But ask yourself this - how many times in history has a despot been captured to be handed over to the people he terrorized? How many times has a tyrant been held accountable for his crimes? One thing I know for certain: no matter what your feelings about the justifications for, or means behind, the War, if you do not see the particular fact of the capture of Saddam with at least a small semblance of satisfaction, you are no friend of liberty.

i'm trying to think of on what web site the following statement could be more absurd than somewhere presumably having some understanding of, or at least respect for, catallactics: "One thing I know for certain: no matter what your feelings about the justifications for, or means behind, the War, if you do not see the particular fact of the capture of Saddam with at least a small semblance of satisfaction, you are no friend of liberty."

one could just as accurately say that if you don't find a small semblance of satisfaction in government boondoggle, you are no friend of healthy babies. austrian economics, which this site explicitly cites favorably, scoffs at the idea of drawing conclusions from tidbits in disregard of the whole. there is little point in evaluating hussein's capture in isolation, and even less in declaring that people are or are not something far beyond the bounds of one man based solely on their opinion of something so specific about that man.

This confusion about what makes a monster like Saddam is exactly why Libertarians (love them though I do) aren't a real political force in America right now. They believe that if only America would return to the pure minimalism of the non-welfare, free-trade, open-borders state, and withdraw from the onerous duties of imperialism, we would have no need of "war-mongering." This world view stems from being unable to process psychotic, devouring personalities like Saddam (and Pol Pot, and Stalin, and Kim Jong Il....)

That is, this belief that "if we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone" assumes that everyone is -- at the end of the day -- fairly rational. They aren't. I'd love it they were and Libertarians ruled, because I'm ill at ease among my war-mongering brethern when they start praying. I like my war-mongering atheistic, myself. But I do believe that Republicans (who have their own flaws) at least have an understanding that pure Libertarians lack: some people suck and you have to take them out.